christi is out in texas for some kind of work training so koda and i have been left to fend for ourselves. i worked from home on monday and halfway through tuesday until our internet went down at the house. i then packed up all of his stuff and headed into the office.

so far the week’s been pretty good, koda and i have been spending a lot of time together. he isn’t as happy when i take him into the office as he is at home, but i figure it’ll just take him a little while to get acclimated.

i had the requisite steak dinner last night, but no pizza yet this week! maybe i will go pick up some pizza tomorrow, we’ll see!

i have been a long time windows user and recently i have started to make the move to mac os x. after switching, there’s a whole bunch of things that one needs to ease the transition:

“Fix” Home/End to work like Windows
remap home/end

Applications:
ACDSee Pro for mac – image viewer
Adium + Adium extras – best IM client for mac
cocoa-sshtunnel– front-end to create ssh tunnels
Cornerstone – svn client
Cyberduck – ftp/sftp client
Firefox – web browser
Growl – notification system
iStat menus – stats about your system in the menu bar
iTerm – terminal replacement
JollysFastVNC – fast VNC client that supports TightVNC protocol
MacFUSE + NTFS-3G – read/write NTFS from mac
MacPorts Project + Porticus – lots of UNIX apps ported to the mac and frontend to the macports.
MAMP – Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP
Microsoft Office 2008
OmniGraffle Pro – Visio replacement
Plex – media center for OS X
Quicksilver – application launcher
uTorrent – bittorrent client
VMware Fusion – run windows/linux in mac
Wine – run windows apps in mac
Witch – a better alt-tab

• Bad moment of the day: smelling something foul only to realize it's coming from me. Must have picked up the wrong pairof jeans this morning. #
• Just got qcup. They haven't disappointed me like ten ren has recently. #
• Had trouble sleeping last night. Having trouble sleeping in this morning. It's going to be a long day. #
• Just furminated te dog. He was a big shed-ball this morning. #
• Anybody else watch the next food network star? Thinking about trying out last weekend's red lobster's challenge winner recipe. #
• Redefine your IN-N-OUT experience with a double double AND fries both animal style! They were fantastic! http://twitpic.com/b5ysv #
• Blush in milpitas gives very large portions of froyo and their froyo is pretty good. http://twitpic.com/bc1zl #
• Took koda for a hike. He thought it would be fun to rub himself in cow poo. Dumb dog. Had to hose him off at home. http://twitpic.com/bgfu9 #

I am sitting here waiting for my In n out order. They are on order number sixty five.

I am number 84. I’m gonna be here forever!

i have been working on this machine for the better part of a week now and i think that i can finally say that i have everything working now. so, what was the final build?

Case: Antec Three Hundred
it all starts with the case. i looked high and low for a case that looked cool. it seems that with the overclocking crowd, cases with windows and neon lights are all the rage. i sort of think that that’s a little tacky and as i looked around, my criteria for a case became pretty clear:
1) attractive looking case
2) provides good airflow
3) cheap

i didn’t think that i could find a cheap, attractive looking case, but then i found this case made by antec. construction is sturdy, there’s good airflow, and plenty of fans in the case. there were a couple of pleasant surprises with the case:
1) the case provides enough thumb screws for everything that you need so that you don’t need to use a screwdriver if you don’t want it.
2) the case provides a space to stow away all your extra power cables from your PSU if you didn’t buy a modular PSU.
3) the fans that come with the case are adjustable!

Motherboard: ASUS P6T SE
the ever popular ASUS P6T now comes in an SE version. all that stripped out is the ability for SLI video. i wasn’t going to do it anyway, so the slightly cheaper motherboard was perfect for my needs. chock full of overclocking options, this motherboard was the perfect home for the CPU.

CPU: Intel Core i7 920 2.66GHz CPU
the motherboard/CPU decision was the hardest for me. I decided to try the Intel Core i7 route and it seems that the 920 processor is the best bang for the buck right now. overclock friendly, but plenty fast on its own, this hyperthreaded quad-core CPU will show up as 8 CPUs in your OS.

RAM: Corsair PC3-12800 12GB kit
yeah, 12GB of ram might be a little excessive, but we’re talking a new machine here. yes, ram is cheap, but when you buy 12GB of ram at a time, it’s a little expensive. still, i figure that at some point i’ll end up using up the ram, especially if i plan to run VMs.

my first batch of 12GB that i got from tigerdirect had a bad stick of ram in it. The heat spreader was not adhered to the chip. I RMA’d it through tigerdirect and my second set worked great.

PSU: Corsair TX-850W 80plus PSU
a nice quiet PSU with plenty of capacity to power the machine. i loved the 450W one that i picked up for the media center that i built. the build quality of the PSU is great. 850W is probably overkill for the machine, but there was a rebate that made it cheaper than the 750W i was planning to get.

Video: EVGA GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512MB
I wanted a fast video card, but i wanted to get something that was supported by osx86tools. this was the fastest card on their list.

and that’s it. i have a couple of 1TB drives in the machine right now, but i’m not sure if they are going to be the final drives in the machine. i also had a spare DVD drive that i pulled out of a machine, but i’m fairly certain that i’m going to be getting a blu-ray writer soon with new hard drives.

OS is installed and the machine is absolutely fantastic. the OS happily reports 8 CPUs and 12GB of ram. things are nice and zippy and overall, i’m quite pleased.

• Haven't had in-n-out in a while. It was much better than i remember it! http://twitpic.com/adj15 #
• I found out that the reason why the computer wasn't booting was b/c I didn't plug in the power to the motherboard. Two places?! Ridiculous! #
• Just processed a return with tigerdirect. It was super easy and painless. Fantastic customer support! #
• I think this is spicy folded green onions. Interesting appetizer. http://twitpic.com/aghyg #
• A bin of ketchup packets makes not a condiments cart. http://twitpic.com/ah5jl #
• Just ate lunch with @choccobo ate sneha. Still looooove the food there. #

i’ve been spending the day cleaning up around the house and watching movies. i’m bringing out some of the classics. the first movie i broke out was “she’s all that”. it’s still as good as the first time i saw it.

and now i’m watching “win a date with tad hamilton” and i just saw my favorite scene in the movie.

pete: tad she is a wonderful person with a huge heart…and the kind of beauty that a guy sees only once, you know, once. listen, tad, if there’s even a chance that you could break her heart, for her sake, walk away, man.

tad: i could never break rosalee’s heart. ok

pete: good. because if you do, i swear to god, i will tear you to pieces with my bare hands…or vicious rhetoric.

oh…it turns out that i must have liked the line a lot the first time around because i blogged about it before.

now that i am starting to fiddle with video, i’m starting to realize that i really need massive amounts of hard drive space for all of this video editing and storage.

after doing some research, i have come to a couple of conclusions. first off, let me describe my current world. the motherboard i have comes with 4 internal SATA ports and 1 eSATA port. this would seem like more ports than anyone would need unless you are crazy like me.

currently, i have a boot drive and a DVD drive taking up 2 of the internal SATA ports leaving me with two ports internally. i will probably end up getting two more internal drives and stripe them for storage. that really only affords me 4TB of storage in system.

in my network, i have a 3TB NAS and a 2TB NAS currently being used as slow storage. the primary NAS rsyncs with the secondary one so that i have some redundancy. i’m not sure if this is enough storage now that video is being introduced into the mix. with my images it was more than enough space.

i’ve been reading about eSATA enclosures and it looks like enclosures that use port multipliers allow multiple drives per enclosure at the expense of performance. maybe this is ok for permanent storage, but not good enough to be a working disk.

the other option is to get an enclosure that has multiple eSATA ports, one for each drive. that would work except i don’t have many eSATA ports available, which means that i would need to find an eSATA add-on card that works in my system. i think i will deal with that when that day comes.

i’m going to see how long the 2x2TB drives will last me for. i was hoping to do a windows install on one of those drives too, so that’ll take some space away from my storage.

EDIT: just opened the case and saw that the machine has 6 internal SATA ports. maybe i can just cram a bunch of drives into this machine after all.

now that i have a mac, there are so many tools that i have available to me that i have not had before. this is both exciting and overwhelming.

i imported my first HD video from the camcorder today. looks like video editing could become quite complicated if i let it. for now, i think i’m ok with simple editing and my aspirations of using premiere or final cut pro may just be left as aspirations. iMovie is a whole lot less intimidating…

but the biggest issue i had was trying to figure out my photo processing workflow. let me tell you, this is critically important to me. i was really disappointed with what my options were.

what i really wanted was some way to browse my RAW photos, take the ones that i am interested into photoshop for processing and then save them out. i was really hoping that iphoto would be the tool for this. what i didn’t realize was that iphoto does not handle RAW files directly. instead, it imports the RAW photos and makes jpeg thumbnails. this is awful for me because then when i drag a photo from iphoto to photoshop, it drags the iphoto-processed jpg, not the RAW image.

if i am doing something wrong here, let me know, but this makes iphoto unusable for me. this sucks because i love, love, love the features that iphoto has to offer.

then i started looking at other options like aperture, but i just don’t get what all the hype around aperture is. it feels a little bloated to me and i’m not convinced that it really will improve my workflow.

coming from my windows workflow of using ACDSee as my image browser, i was desperate and googled “ACDSee mac” to see what other people were doing. well, guess what? ACDSee for mac is in beta and let me tell you it is fantastic. FANTASTIC. my workflow from windows can be directly moved over to the mac and all is well in the world again.

so i have decided to build a new machine. this decision comes after much deliberation about whether or not i would need one, what kind to build, and just how much money i would budget for it.

usually a desktop for me has a budget of around $500. dells make great desktops. they are cheap, they are reliable, and work great. my last few desktops have been dells and i have been very pleased with them.

this time, though, i knew that i wanted to build a desktop that could deal with the processing requirements of editing video. and not just any video, but HD video. and so the quest began.

really, when it comes to editing video, it’s all about the software. and when it comes to software, i think that the mac software reigns king. so what to do? i looked at mac pros and holy cow, they are EXPENSIVE. you’re looking at over $3000 for a machine.

sure the cases are beautiful, but…man.

and so the next choice was to start looking at an osx86 solution. it turns out that you can build a pretty decent machine for about $1000 with supported hardware.